Segment, Monetize, Retain, Repeat

At the core of every marketing campaign is a bid for retention. Having caught a consumer's attention once, the ultimate goal is to keep that person coming back for more.

And the magic formula for making that happen in an e-commerce environment is simple. In fact, there's really only one ingredient: automation. It's not the only tool you should have in your digital toolkit, but without it tracking and reacting to customer behavior in real time is virtually impossible to pull off at scale.

“You can have the most brilliant brains and the best in-house data scientists, but if you can't execute quickly, you're going to end up blasting people with irrelevant messaging,” says Pini Yakuel, CEO of retention automation service Optimove.

A new suite of tools from Optimove aims to help marketers maximize the lifetime value of customers across the lifecycle by killing churn in its tracks. In addition to improved customer response prediction capabilities—in other words, more robust algorithms for better targeting—the suite includes a calendar-based marketing management tool to help users track and optimize campaigns.

“To stop churn you have to entice the customer; the strategy is simply to get personal and let the customer feel that you understand them and remember things about them,” Yakuel says. “When you can remember things like customer preference, that's when your marketing gets more relevant.”

There's little disagreement out there that marketers have no lack of data volume. The issue is being smart about it.

“The only way to get personal when you have tons of data is proper segmentation,” Yakuel says. “And when we say segmentation, we don't mean a basic slicing of the data—we mean something more profound and scientific.”

There's no getting down to a segment of one without an automation tool.

Looking forward into 2014 and beyond, Yakuel predicts a continued and growing focus on personalization and retention technology, especially in the e-commerce space.

“Typically, up until now, all marketing technology has been focused around the acquisition side, and marketeers spend a lot of money on the acquisitions they get from Facebook and Google and affiliates,” Yakuel says. “The question now is, how can we optimize that spend?”